Schadenfreude Friday: Louisville Loses Scholarships

I think the APR, though not perfect, is a good thing. However, as I’ve posted before, the facts are that athletes in general and, specifically, money sport athletes have been unjustly singled out to shoulder a bad academic reputation. I’m not going to say that football and basketball players universally go to class, get good grades and graduate. Rather, if left to their own devices, a large fraction would be bad students, but not, on average, as bad as their more athletically challenged fellow students. The problem is that people are just unaware of how really terrible the average academic performance is for ALL college students. So when the media or someone else with an ax to grind publishes the grades, class attendance statistics and graduation rates for athletes without mentioning how they compare to their non-athlete peers, they are aghast. If they knew these athletes are actually doing better on average than rest of the student body, they’d be even more disgusted at the general waste of the educational opportunity provided by their parents, community and society in general.

Take for example typical student progress toward college graduation. The reality is that low college graduation rates are not limited to college athletes in any fashion. For example, the Boston Globe published a study in 2008 concerning completion rates for all Boston students who entered institutions of higher learning in what is often referred to as the "Center of American Higher Education." They found: (1) "Students attending two-year community colleges had a 12 percent graduation rate;" (2) "Students attending four-year public state colleges had approximately a 33 percent graduation rate;" and, (3) "Students at four-year, private colleges managed the best rate but still only a 56 percent graduation rate." Further, "for those aspiring college students who finished in the bottom 40 percent of their high school classes, but went on to attempt to secure a four-year degree right out of high school, roughly two-thirds had studied for the better part of eight and a half years without obtaining a diploma." Viewed in light of these findings, when it comes to graduation rates, I think you might be hard pressed to find that college athletic programs are other than the scapegoat for a much wider and pervasive problem in American educational institutions and the students attending them.

To comment specifically on Louisville: Charlie Strong is an outright moron!

In other Card news, Louisville football lost three scholarships due to low APR. When reached for comment, Charlie Strong downplayed it and said, "Those guys would have probably gotten arrested and suspended anyway. No loss." – Kentucky Sports Radio